


Il Buco della Ciambella

by Srin



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Injury, M/M, Porn with Feelings, food-based sex jokes, unexpected side-effects of immortality, unorthodox penetration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26074222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Srin/pseuds/Srin
Summary: For the most part, they get injured and they heal and five minutes later the only physical evidence that anything was ever wrong is the leftover blood. But every once in a while, things go a little weirder.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 50
Kudos: 185





	Il Buco della Ciambella

**Author's Note:**

> I am honestly not entirely sure how best to warn for this, because it's not exactly normal porn but it doesn't really fit any of the usual categories either. So, please check the end-notes if you'd like more details before deciding if it's for you!

* * *

For the most part, they get injured and they heal and five minutes later the only physical evidence that anything was ever wrong is the leftover blood. But every once in a while, things go a little weirder. Once, Nicky and Joe dug Andy out of the rubble after an earthquake to find her hungry, cranky, and perfectly fine … except for the fact that one of her arms and both of her legs had extra angles in them, because her broken bones hadn’t bothered to wait for the half-ton of rock on top of her to be removed before healing as best they could. They’ve all had a few experiences with some bit of shrapnel popping out a couple of days after the fight because the entry wound repaired itself faster than the bone the thing was embedded in did. And then there’s the donut hole incident.

* * *

A mission gone wrong results in Nicky falling from an upper floor of a semi-demolished building and ending up skewered on a length of rebar. After he wakes up, he can’t get himself off the rebar, and by the time the others get to him, the wound has fully healed _around_ the intrusion. It leaves a sort of tunnel, a little bigger than a bottle cap, running clear through his abdomen.

“Is he just gonna be like that forever now?” Nile asks, equal parts appalled and fascinated, when they get back to the house and the tunnel is still there.

“Nah, it’ll close up eventually,” Andy says. “Maybe a week or two?”

“And until then he’s a donut.”

“I imagine Joe has something to add here about Nicky’s sweetness and/or cream filling,” Andy says.

Nile snorts. But Joe is still too horrified by the literal gaping hole in Nicky’s gut to joke. He knows, intellectually, that it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with Nicky’s immortality, the opposite in fact, and that Andy is right and it will sort itself out after a while. But knowing it intellectually doesn’t stop his instincts from screaming _no no no wrong wrong wrong_ every time he looks at or thinks about it. Nicky, on the other hand, is pretty zen about the whole thing. 

“Please, if I am to be a ring-shaped baked good it ought to be ciambella,” he says.

“Which is a type of donut,” Andy points out.

“Some of the sweet varieties maybe. I was thinking ciambella al pesto,” Nicky says.

“Pesto genovese, naturally,” Andy says.

“Naturally.”

“I know pesto genovese, but what’s ciambella?” Nile asks.

“He will make it for you _when he doesn’t have a giant hole in his gut_ ,” Joe interrupts, and Nicky gives the rest of them an apologetic shrug, like Joe is the one behaving inappropriately here, and lets Joe drag him off to the bathroom to clean up.

“It was not pleasant when it occurred, but it no longer hurts,” he assures Joe later. “The draft feels rather strange. Otherwise it’s just … sensitive.”

And indeed, Nicky doesn’t exactly seem bothered by what everyone starts referring to as his donut hole (because ciambella al pesto hole just doesn’t have the same ring to it). But he can’t seem to leave it alone, either. Joe keeps noticing him poking at it, running his fingers around the edge, dipping them inside. It makes sense, sure, it’s a weird novelty, especially for someone whose body has been largely unchanged for almost a millennium. As much as the constant reminder of the trauma that caused the thing unsettles Joe, he has to admit, he finds it a bit intriguing too, this curious new feature of the body he knows better than his own. And there’s something about the way Nicky keeps touching it, and the very deliberate way he looks at Joe every time he says it’s _sensitive_. It doesn’t really make sense, there’s no logical reason for there to be a lot of nerve endings in a stretch of skin that shouldn’t even exist, but it’s not like anything else about their immortality is all that rational either.

The house they retreated to after the rebar debacle is one that has furniture and heating in more than one room, and donut hole aside, things are relaxed enough that they are actually sleeping in different bedrooms instead of all piling in together. But bringing up the possibility of exploring Nicky’s new orifice with Nile and Andy right there in the next room still seems a little too weird, even for them. One of the benefits of centuries of cohabitating, though, is that sometimes you don’t need to spell things out.

“Nile and I are going out,” Andy announces one morning.

And Nicky nods and says, “Will you be gone long?” with a look that says _the correct answer is yes_.

And Andy says, “Back after dinner maybe?” with a look that says _is that enough_?

And Nicky smiles, grateful, and says, “That will be perfect.”

“We’ll bring dessert,” Nile says, grabbing her jacket. From the way she looks between Andy and Nicky, she clearly knows there was more to their exchange than what was said aloud, but she’s also been around them long enough by now to recognize that this time it’s a _just go with it_ thing, not a _make them explain themselves because ‘it **probably** won’t blow up before we get outside’ wasn’t a reasonable plan **before** you lost your immortality, Jesus, Andy_ thing.

“Dunno if we’ll find ciambella around here but maybe a bundt cake?” Nile adds, and Andy grins so broadly at that that Joe reigns in the urge to do an obscene gesture that Nile probably wouldn’t get anyway, though Nicky and Andy definitely would. 

Once the women are out the door, Joe steels himself for the profound ridiculousness of the words he is about to utter, and says, “Nicky, do you want us to do sex things with your donut hole?”

And Nicky beams at him and says, “Thank fuck, I thought you would never ask.”

“You could have asked,” Joe says, settling his hands on Nicky’s hips.

“You were so troubled by it, I didn’t want to upset you,” Nicky says, cupping his face.

“You fell out of a building and died,” Joe says, serious now. “And it took us so long to get to you that you have a tunnel through your guts. How am I supposed to be okay with that?”

Nicky tilts Joe’s face down to kiss his brow, and then leans their foreheads together.

“I understand. I wouldn’t like it either, if it were you,” Nicky admits, soft and earnest. “But I am fine, and it will close, and I would very much like to find out how it feels to have your tongue in it before it does.”

And there isn’t really anything Joe can say to that.

They retreat to their bedroom. Joe locks the door, just in case, while Nicky sheds his clothes, and then Joe does the same while Nicky stretches out on the bed, arms folded behind his head, legs spread wide in clear invitation. Joe settles between them on his knees, leaning in to examine the hole, which he refuses to think of as a donut hole now that they’re naked.

He’s seen it before, of course, had helped Nicky to clean out the blood and dirt when it first happened, but he hasn’t looked closely since. He’s pretty sure it has already gotten a little smaller than it was then, which is reassuring. There’s no redness or scarring, so it doesn’t really even seem like an injury, which helps too. More like a second navel, just bigger and much deeper and off to one side.

Joe runs his fingertips in a wide circle around it, keeping to the normal skin of Nicky’s stomach at first. The hole is weird, but concentrating on an area that is not a traditional erogenous zone isn’t. There is no part of Nicky’s body that Joe has not fixated on at some point during their lives together; entire sketchbooks tucked away in various safe houses bear witness to past obsessions with his wrists, his toes, the backs of his knees. Nicky, for his part, has a skill for turning the most mundane contact into something unreasonably erotic through the sustained application of his unwavering attention. Once, while they were hiding out in some freezing dump somewhere in the depths of a Russian winter, when it was too cold to even consider taking any of their many layers off, Nicky had begun playing with Joe’s hair, and eventually managed to make him come with nothing more than icy fingers on his scalp and a few well-timed words whispered in his ear.

But it’s not a Russian winter and the others won’t be gone forever, so Joe doesn’t wait too long to start spiralling in closer to the hole in Nicky’s stomach. Nicky watches him, eyes wide and dark, patient. He doesn’t need to say anything; Joe can tell by the hitch in Nicky’s breathing when he reaches the _sensitive_ bit. Joe keeps circling around it for a while, light teasing touches, just skating the rim of the opening. He rests his other hand on the flat of Nicky’s belly, and enjoys feeling the muscles there tense and jump as Nicky gets more and more worked up. He’s getting hard now too, but they both ignore it. Time enough for that later.

Joe sweeps his fingers around the rim of the hole one more time, and then licks them and finally lets one sink properly inside. The skin lining this channel that shouldn’t exist is hairless and pink and so, so soft, no wonder it’s sensitive. Joe presses a second finger in and it goes in easy, though he doesn’t think there would be room for anything more. It’s not like the usual sort of fingering, no ring of muscle to coax open, no room to stretch either. This exquisitely soft skin is barely wrinkled, the passage it lines not made to accommodate anything larger than the intrusion that created it. That thought makes Joe’s own gut clench in a decidedly unpleasant way and he shies away from it, focussing instead on the beautifully desperate sounds he can elicit from Nicky by rubbing his fingertips along the warm walls of the channel.

And Nicky is desperate already, chest rising and falling rapidly, face flushed, hips stuttering like he wants to thrust but doesn’t dare to do anything that might make Joe stop moving his fingers in the hole. He still has his arms behind his head but his hands are clenched tight in his own hair now, nothing relaxed about the pose anymore. The sight and his noises are enough to have Joe hardening too, but he ignores that as well.

He does shift around, though, settling down flat on his stomach between Nicky’s legs, one arm slung across Nicky’s hips to help still them, the other propped against the bed so he can keep working his fingers in the hole. Nicky asked for his tongue, before, and he wants to do that too, but first –

“How does it feel?” Joe asks in Italian. Nicky’s not naturally much of a talker in bed, especially when he isn’t the one taking charge of the proceedings, but he’ll try if Joe asks. Which is alluring enough on its own, that he’s willing to make the effort, and the things he comes out with aren’t always very coherent but they’re always some kind of wonderful.

“Like you’re inside of me but not – not the usual way, like –” Nicky breaks off, breathing hard, and Joe lets him have a moment to just ride the sensations before prompting him again.

“Tell me.”

“It’s always been yours,” Nicky says, “everything in me, the places that are normally just – just gut and bone, out of reach, only now you can touch that too – ahh–”

“Fuck,” Joe groans, and he has to stop for a moment, head tipped down against Nicky’s stomach, breathing through an overwhelming surge of heat and want and love. As if that weren’t enough, then he feels a hand on the back of his head, Nicky stroking his hair with shaking fingers. Not tugging, not nudging him to do anything, just there, close, utterly undemanding even as his erection is straining against Joe’s chest. Joe doesn’t say anything because there isn’t anything he could say; all the words in all the languages they know are inadequate for what he feels in this moment.

He’s not sure how long they stay like that, but Joe gets a hold of himself eventually. When he does, he pulls his fingers out of the hole, and Nicky whines at the loss but only for a moment, because Joe wets them again and slides his hand around, underneath Nicky, groping blindly until he finds the other end of the channel on Nicky’s back and sinks both fingers in there. Joe kisses Nicky’s hip, and then a spot just a little to the side of the hole, and then he presses his lips to the hole itself and pushes in with his tongue.

It is, it turns out, a good thing they waited until Andy and Nile were out of the house to do this. Joe and Nicky both tend to try to keep reasonably quiet when they don’t have complete privacy, and Nicky’s good at it, can when necessary make it through the entirety of an orgasm with little more than a soft grunt. Which can be very useful under the right circumstances, but any attempt to suppress the euphoric half-shout, half-moan cries pouring out of him as Joe tongue-fucks the front of his hole and finger-fucks the back of it would be a travesty.

Joe wonders if Nicky could come just from this, Joe’s fingers and his tongue in this unbearably intimate opening that shouldn’t even be there. Wonders if he might not come himself from rocking his hips against the bed while he feels Nicky fall apart underneath him. And maybe they’ll find out, later, but Nicky’s fingers are twisting in Joe’s hair now in the way that means he’s so so close and wants Joe to take him over the edge, and Joe doesn’t have the slightest interest in denying him anything, so he brings his free hand down to wrap around Nicky’s cock and it barely takes three strokes before he’s spilling between them with another glorious exclamation. Joe keeps working on him, wringing every last drop of pleasure out of him, until he finally goes quiet and slack against the bed.

Joe releases Nicky’s cock first, and then eases his fingers from the hole, and finally withdraws his mouth with a last light kiss and looks up. He half expects Nicky to have passed out, it wouldn’t be the first time, but he’s not asleep. No, he’s grinning down at Joe, looking so soft and tender and pleased that Joe would be tempted to reach for a sketchbook to capture it, if he thought he could concentrate on holding a pencil with how turned on he is.

“Come here,” Nicky says, and Joe does, scrambling up the bed to kiss his mouth. Nicky’s hands slide into Joe’s hair again, and he hitches his legs up around Joe’s thighs, keeping him close. Joe would be content to stay like that, stretched out along the length of Nicky’s body, enjoying his kisses, rutting against the cradle of his hips, but Nicky has other ideas. He pushes Joe off him after a couple of minutes, gentle but firm, and Joe doesn’t resist, equally content to go along with whatever else Nicky has in mind.

Nicky sits up, scoots back against the headboard, and tugs Joe over to straddle his lap, so his cock is roughly on a level with the hole in Nicky’s stomach. There’s no way Joe’s cock is actually going to go into the hole, the angle’s all wrong and it wouldn’t fit anyway, at least not in a way that would actually be fun for either of them. Joe starts to say something regretful but there’s no need, Nicky’s already giving him that infinitely fond look of _don’t be ridiculous, just trust me_. And Joe does, drapes his arms around Nicky’s neck and grins back at him and trusts him to do whatever he’s going to do.

Nicky manoeuvres them so the head of Joe’s cock is pressed against the hole, not trying to get inside, just riding against it, getting that delicious tease of almost-almost-almost while Nicky uses his hands. His lovely, clever hands, one curled around Joe’s cock and the other sliding further to fondle Joe’s balls in the way that he loves and can never quite manage himself. Joe tips his head against Nicky’s and closes his eyes and gives himself up to it.

When Joe comes, it mostly lands on Nicky’s stomach but a little ends up in the hole too. They both look at it for a moment, and then look at each other. And Joe, still a bit high on his release, can’t help himself.

“Cream filling?” he says, and Nicky cracks up and tries to tackle him, tries to kiss and wrestle all at once, and they’re both laughing so hard they almost fall off the bed.

* * *

They spend most of the day naked in their room, only emerging occasionally for snacks or other necessities, and finally for a shower after they’ve worn themselves out. Andy’s timing is excellent; Nicky gets the text warning that she and Nile are on their way back as he and Joe are getting dressed.

That night, when they settle in to sleep, Joe drapes his arm over Nicky’s chest as usual, but Nicky takes his hand and tugs it down to his belly.

“You wanna go again?” Joe asks, a little surprised. He’s never going to say no to Nicky but he is exhausted, and thought Nicky was too.

“Mm-mm,” Nicky says, sounding half-asleep already. “Just want you there. While it lasts.”

Joe obligingly slips one finger into the hole, not teasing, just holding steady, and Nicky gives a satisfied hum and relaxes against him.

 _The places that are just gut and bone_ , Nicky had said before, and Joe knows what he meant, but no part of him could ever be _just_ anything to Joe. Every inch of him is precious, his outsides and his insides and this temporary anomaly that’s sort of both, that lets Joe make him feel good in a way they’ve never gotten to do before. Lets him sink in and touch the out-of-reach places that are, in a way, where Joe has always lived, because Nicky is his heart but the heart alone has never been enough to contain all they are to each other.

* * *

As Andy predicted, the hole keeps shrinking gradually, and after a couple of weeks it’s like it was never there at all. Which is good, obviously, Nicky should not have a hole through his gut forever. But all the same, they’re both a little disappointed when it’s finally gone.

* * *

One day, a few months later, while they’re somewhere in Canada, Nile comes back with a box of donuts. Which is fine. But then Andy picks up a glazed one, and starts thrusting her finger through the hole with a lascivious smirk on her face, and Nicky makes a slightly choked sound and looks at Joe, and Joe can feel his face going red. Nicky, on the other hand, recovers quickly only to look entirely too pleased with himself. If there were any doubt that the others know exactly why, it’s dispelled when Andy gives a whoop of satisfaction and says to Nile,

“What did I tell you? Pay up, kiddo!”

“Nu-uh, wait just a minute, that wasn’t the bet,” Nile objects. She shoots Joe a remorseful look, because she is a nice person, though obviously not nice enough to take the loss and let it go so they don’t have to have this conversation. Still. Partial credit. “I never said they wouldn’t get kinky with it,” she goes on. “What I _said_ was, ‘Joe is not gonna put his dick in Nicky’s donut hole, ‘cause it wouldn’t _fit_.’”

A lot of the places they stay in don’t have much hot water, and Nile had already had sufficient experience of communal showers in the military not to balk at their habit of all going in together to clean up when needed, so she’s seen enough to know what she’s talking about. So has Andy, but then Andy has always considered physical limitations to be more of a challenge to overcome than a reason to stop.

Andy and Nile both turn to them expectantly.

Joe groans and hides his face in his hands. It’s not like he and Nicky have anything resembling shame about their sex life, but they do try to keep the more private things private. Of course, there’s basically zero chance of either Andy or Nile letting this drop without an answer, but that doesn’t mean Joe has to be the one to encourage them.

“Well?” Andy says, impatient.

“Nile is correct,” Nicky says serenely, and reaches over to give Joe’s shoulder a soothing squeeze.

“Hah!” Nile shouts in triumph.

“I am very disappointed in you both,” Andy grumbles.

Joe doesn’t bother to look up, but he does raise one hand to do an obscene gesture, and going by Nile’s affronted huff someone has already told her what it means.

* * *

The next time they’re in Italy, Nile goes out and brings back ciambella al pesto. Joe’s not entirely convinced this counts as an apology, but it is good and it makes Nicky smile, so he’ll take it.

**Author's Note:**

> More detailed content notes: Nicky gets injured and due to the circumstances, he's left with a hole in his stomach that is basically healed, but doesn't disappear right away. It's not an open wound and it's not painful, but it is sensitive so he and Joe use it for sexual purposes.
> 
> Other notes: The title is Italian for 'The Donut Hole', because everything sounds better in Italian. There are a lot of different types of ciambella, most of which are sweet. Ciambella al pesto genovese is a savoury variation using basil pesto from Nicky's hometown.


End file.
